Waking Born Choir

Our Choral Director, Faith Rivera put together the 16 person choir for the Life Without Breath project; locating, contacting and securing commitments from all the choir members, providing rehearsal tapes and music and leading rehearsals.

The recording session was at Paramount Recording Studios in Hollywood. On the day of the session, "Guy of Paramount" (our engineer for the day), set up two mikes in the center and the choir gathered around in a circle so as to be able to see each other and "feel the vibe". We recorded several takes of each track until we had the perfect performance you can hear on the album today. The choir sings on the tracks called "Dust to Dust", "Be Free", and "We Are Love" for the Life Without Breath project.

Faith and Kenyatta recorded solos after the choral work was printed to tape, and you can hear them at the end of "Dust to Dust" and during "We Are Love".

David Stern served as our Choral Arranger for each of these tracks. David was formerly a faculty member at Mannes College of Music in New York City, and now lives and works here in Los Angeles doing freelance composition, orchestration and arranging.

Later, at another recording session, three of the choir members, Faith, Christa and Tricia, performed backing vocals for the track "Into the Night" at Waking Born's own project studio. And Faith did some arranging of her own on the track "Dust to Dust", adding interesting variations on the theme for the vocal trio who performed on that track. Faith also laid down the lead female vocals on "Goin Down", returning at a later date to finish off the piece for the album.

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